API Best Practices

Environment Setup

To ensure a successful integration, we recommend you avoid only using your single app account for testing. Using APIs to create merchants and their accounts, and charging to these accounts will lead to a solid understanding of access tokens, app and WePay fees, and both your and your merchants account transactions. Also, be sure to be utilizing the stage environment for testing.

Using IPNs

Instant Payment Notifications are a considered a key component of a successful integration. We strongly recommend making use of the callback_uri on every appropriate API call. You can learn more in the IPN reference document.

Account Names and Soft Descriptors

When a charge appears on the cardholder's statement, it will be in the form WPY*. To avoid refunds, chargebacks, and any associated fees due to recognition issues, use payment account names which are easily recognizable.

Understanding Fees

Make sure you understand how WePay's fees structure works including WePay's processing fees and your own app fees. You can a full explanation, and a fee calculator on our fees documentation page.

Throttle Limits & Batching Requests

In an effort to protect all our partners from poor performance, our system uses API throttling. Even the largest of partners rarely need their limits modified, but we do realize, under rare circumstances, exceptions must be made. If you feel you need a higher limit after testing reasonable use cases and implementing batch requests, we're happy to evaluate your specific situation. You can read more about this in the throttling and batch calls reference pages.